-"Out of Control"
Honeycomb Thinking is from Out of Control by kevin kelly (1994). Simply put, "hive thinking" is "group thinking". The colony structure of bees, each individual has his own division of labor, and spontaneously maintains the whole hive. The hive is like a whole, which brings together each individual's thinking. Kevin Kay uses hive thinking to describe the collective wisdom brought by human cooperation.
1. The "hive thinking" of bees
Where is the "Spirit of Bees"? As early as 190 1, the Belgian writer Moliis maeterlinck put forward this question: Who rules it, who issues orders and who foresees the future?
Now it is certain that the ruler is not the queen bee. When the bees appear from the narrow exit in front of the hive, the queen bee can only follow. The queen's daughter is responsible for choosing when and where to settle down. Five or six unknown worker bees are scouting ahead, checking tree holes and wall holes where beehives may be placed. When they come back, they report to the rest of the bees with the agreed dance. In the report, the more exaggerated the scout's dance, the better the position she advocated. Then, according to the intensity of the dance, some leaders looked at several alternative locations and agreed by joining the scout's rotation dance. This will lead more followers to visit the candidate websites with the upper hand, and then join the noisy dance of like-minded scouts to express their choices when they come back.
Except scouts, few bees will explore multiple locations. The bee saw a message: "Go there, it's a good place." They went to see it, came back to dance and said, "Yes, it's a good place." Through this repeated emphasis, the destination attracts more tourists, so more tourists join in. According to the law of increasing returns, the more votes, the less objections. Gradually, a large group dance snowballed and became the main creation of the last chapter of the dance music. The biggest bee colony wins.
This is an election hall owned, enjoyed and ruled by idiots, but the effect is extremely amazing. This is the essence of democratic system, which is completely distributed management. At the end of the song, the curtain fell. According to the people's choice, the bee colony carries the queen bee and thunderous buzz, and moves towards the goal determined by group selection. This is a combination of 20,000 mobs, which is similar to Bitcoin.
2. Ant's "Honeycomb Thinking"
The migration of ant colony from one settlement to another will present Kafka nightmare effect under the control of emergence. You will see that while a group of ants are dragging eggs, larvae and pupae to the west, another group of hot pillow worker ants are dragging their belongings to the east at the same speed. At the same time, there are some ants, perhaps aware of the confusion and conflict of signals, running around empty-handed. This is a typical office scene.
However, despite this, the whole ant colony was successfully transferred. Without any definite decision from the superior, the ant colony chooses a new location, sends a signal to the worker ants to start nesting, and then starts self-management.
3. Bird's "Honeycomb Thinking"
A flock of birds is not a giant bird. James gleick, a reporter for Science Report, wrote: "No matter how smooth a bird or a fish moves, it can't bring us the shock brought by a dense queue of starlings or millions of minnows circling in a corn field. High-speed movies show that the turning action is transmitted from one bird to another at a speed of about one-seventieth of a second in the form of waves. Much faster than a bird. " Birds are far from a simple collection of birds.
4. Swarm intelligence generated by the algorithm
In The Return of Batman, there is a scene in which a large group of black bats rush through a flooded tunnel and flock to the center of new york. These bats are made by computers. The animator first makes a bat and gives it a certain space so that it can flap its wings automatically. Then copy dozens of bats until they swarm. After that, let each bat fly around the screen alone, but follow a few simple rules of the implantation algorithm: don't bump into other bats, keep up with the bats next to you, and don't leave the team too far. When these "algorithmic bats" run on the screen, they flock like real bats.
5. Emergence-the invisible hand
The magic of "hive thinking" is that no bees are controlling it, but there is an invisible hand, a hand that emerges from a large number of dull members and controls the whole group. Its magic also lies in the qualitative change caused by quantitative change. If we want to transition from a single insect body to a colony, we only need to increase the number of insects, so that a large number of insects can gather together and enable them to communicate with each other. At a certain stage, when the complexity reaches a certain level, "clusters" will emerge from "bugs".
Wheeler, the pioneer of ant research, believes that the superorganism formed by clusters "emerges" from a large number of ordinary insect organisms. He pointed out that this appearance is a kind of science, a technical and rational explanation, not mysticism or alchemy.
Emergence is a very common natural phenomenon. The concept of emergence represents a different type of causality. Here, 2+2 is not equal to 4, and it is even impossible to accidentally equal 5. In emerging logic, 2+2= Apple. When listening to Bach, all the "Bach breath" that fills our body and mind is a poetic picture, which appropriately shows how meaningful patterns emerge from notes and other information.
The fastest, most direct and only reliable way to understand the emerging structure of a system is to run it. In this regard, what lurks in human individuals and does not emerge, unless all people are connected through interpersonal communication or political management? In this bionic super thinking similar to a beehive, something unexpected must be brewing. There is a universal law about life system: the existence of low level cannot infer the complexity of high level.
Computer scientists are increasingly aware that cellular thinking and distributed problems are integrated, and they are all patterns emerging from a large number of interconnected components.
6. From quantitative change to qualitative change
The emergence of things mostly depends on a certain number of individuals, a group, a group, a gang or more. A water tank full of water, when you pull out the plug of the water tank, the water will start to stir and form a vortex. The whirlpool develops into a whirlpool and grows like life. In a short time, the vortex spread from the water surface to the bottom of the tank, driving the water in the whole tank. The ever-changing waterfall of water molecules rotates in the tornado, constantly changing the shape of the vortex.
Whenever we unplug the plug, the vortex will appear without exception. Vortex is a new thing-just like a group, its energy and structure are contained in the energy and characteristics of the group rather than a single water molecule. Like all new things, the characteristics of vortex come from a large number of other individuals. A drop of water is not enough to show the vortex, and a handful of sand is not enough to cause the collapse of sand dunes.
Quantity can make essential difference. A grain of sand can not cause the collapse of sand dunes, but once enough sand is accumulated, sand dunes will appear, which will lead to a sand collapse. Some physical properties, such as temperature, also depend on the collective behavior of molecules. When the degree of connection is high and the number of members is large, the dynamic characteristics of group behavior-quantitative change leads to qualitative change.
7. Blockchain: 2 1 century icon.
Atoms are symbols of science in the 20th century. Atoms symbolize the simple power represented by simplicity and represent Newton's mechanistic worldview. Both science and management follow a top-down hierarchical structure. A Zen thought: the atom is the past, and the scientific symbol of the next century is a vibrant network.
The icon of the network has no center-it is a large group of interconnected dots, a net made of a bunch of arrows pointing at each other and entangled with each other. Darwin discussed how species emerged from individuals in his famous book The Origin of Species. The interests of these individuals conflict with each other, but they are interrelated. When he tried to find an illustration to end the book, he chose a tangled net.
Network is the only organizational form that can develop without prejudice or learn without guidance. All other topologies limit what can happen. The topological structure of a group is varied, but only a huge network structure can contain the true diversity of forms.
The network is the symbol of the group, and the resulting group organization-distributed system-spreads itself all over the network, so that no part can say "I am me." The thoughts of countless individuals get together and form an irreversible sociality. It expresses not only computer logic, but also natural logic, thus showing a power beyond understanding. Hidden in the network is the mysterious invisible hand-a kind of control without authority. Atoms represent simplicity and clarity, while networks convey the messy power generated by complexity.
1962, the first influential paper "Distributed Communication Network" announced the birth of the network. In the following decades, the network has made great progress and developed into the Internet with walled gardens. People find that walled gardens are not fortresses, but more like prisons.
Blockchain came into being at this time. Bitcoin broke this wall for the first time after the 2008 financial crisis and created a new world. After nearly ten years' development, it has rapidly developed into an emerging industry with 334.2 billion US dollars. Blockchain is based on P2P network and integrates cryptography, probability theory, computer science, behavioral economics, sociology and other disciplines. And rely on group wisdom and emerging models to form a distributed, decentralized, collaborative and adaptive network. The blockchain will set off a revolution, and the honeycomb-like group is the protagonist of this revolution.
8. Mathematical principles in Darwin's time
The most unacceptable part of Darwin's theory of natural selection is its inevitability. The conditions of natural selection are very special, but once these conditions are met, natural selection will inevitably happen! Natural selection may not be called biological law. It happened not in biology, but in probability theory.
Evolution is not a biological process, it integrates technology, mathematics, information and biological processes. It can almost be said that evolution is a physical law that applies to all groups, whether they have genes or not.
I believe that life has mathematics. Natural selection may be addition in this kind of mathematics. In order to fully explain the origin of life, complex trends and the emergence of intelligence, we need not only addition, but also rich mathematics, which is composed of various complex functions based on each other. It needs a deeper evolution. Natural selection alone is not enough. If you want to make a difference, you must be involved in the process of becoming more creative and productive. It must have more means than natural selection.
Just as multiplication is some kind of addition operation, a brand-new power emerges from this fast operation. If we only regard multiplication as the repetition of addition, we will never master this power. If you are only satisfied with addition, you will never get E=mc? .
When it comes together, everything will be different: the more polymers there are, the more likely the interaction initiated by one polymer will increase exponentially. At a certain point, the increasing diversity and the number of polymers will reach a critical value, so that a certain number of polymers in the system will instantly form a spontaneous ring, a self-generating, self-supporting and self-transforming chemical network.
Blockchain is such a network, which aggregates self-organizing hives, makes natural selection from multiple dimensions, and operates at different scales, rhythms and styles. This diversified deep evolution, like intelligence, emerged from a dynamic community. The most adaptable system is so unruly that there is a fine line between it and losing control. Evolutionary systems will find this balance on their own.
Quoting the words in Abbosh the Weird Man, he said, "I am more concerned with blank places, forms that can be imagined but cannot be realized." In the blockchain network, the future has arrived!